Yesterday's word-of-the-day from the Oxford English Dictionary was "ruse de guerre," defined as "A stratagem; esp. one intended to deceive an enemy in war. Hence: a justifiable trick or deception."
The idea that deceptions and betrayals are acceptable under certain circumstances is really the defining feature of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Clinton's supporters aren't just willing to overlook the lies and corruption of their candidate. They're positively eager to do so in the name of defeating Donald Trump.
Do they know that she's lying about her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Yes, but they have to support her anyway . . . because Trump!
But wouldn't they prefer it if she would just be honest about her support for the TPP? No--because honesty might cost her some votes.
Will they be disappointed when she signs the TPP into law as president? Of course not, since her phony opposition to it is simply a ruse de guerre to defeat Trump.
The same logic applies to every lie Clinton tells, every question from a reporter that she dodges, every vulnerable community that she sacrifices on the altar of "centrist appeal." It's all justifiable--every bit of it . . . because Trump!
As long as Clinton supporters accept Trump as the "existential threat" to the U.S. that he's made out to be, they will feel completely justified about their own betrayals of the democratic process, the Constitution, and their fellow citizens.
But Trump isn't an existential threat to anything.
He's simply the ruse de guerre that makes it easy for the Clinton media machine to justify every other ruse de guerre.
Trump is the neo-fascist strawman that allows Clinton to define herself negatively (as "not-Trump") instead of positively (which would be impossible, since there isn't any "there" there with Clinton).
I've been on the fence about Trump's intentions until today. Sometimes it looks like he doesn't know what he's doing, but sometimes it looks like he's trying to lose.
I considered the rumors that his campaign is a false flag operation for Clinton. I understood why some people believed that, but I never saw evidence that struck me as conclusive.
But when Fortune reported that the Trump campaign hired CrowdStrike to deal with a recent hacking episode, the scales fell from my eyes.
Cybersecurity companies like CrowdStrike can't do what they're hired to do without having access to the computer networks of their clients, so such clients must be willing to trust their data guardians with their most important secrets.
The fact that CrowdStrike is a high-profile cybersecurity firm with a track record of investigating hacks of political campaigns is perhaps a good reason to trust them.
But the fact that CrowdStrike is already working for the DNC is a much better reason for the RNC candidate not to trust them.
I don't know what this hire looks like to the rest of the world, but to me, it's a plain signal that the data networks of the Clinton campaign and the Trump campaign have now been fused through CrowdStrike.
And when we later learn that CrowdStrike was able to coordinate Clinton's coronation through an analysis of data voluntarily provided to them by Trump's campaign, the Clinton supporters will smile at the impoverished and imprisoned people of a toxic, smoldering planet and say that merging the campaigns was a ruse de guerre.
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